Eric D. Snider

Between them, Max Weaver and Peter Myer have about 140 years of art experience. They're retired from teaching, but neither has stopped working.

"I've been painting regularly," said Weaver, 86, who lives in Orem. "Until this last year, I did pottery, too. I'd throw pots in the morning, trim in the afternoon, and then decorate."

His partner in the show now open at the UVSC Woodbury Gallery, 68-year-old Provo resident Myer, said much of his own part of the exhibit consists of work he's done in the past 18 months. "Some of them, I'm still hoping to get finished in time," he said.

Weaver and Myers are both retired professors of art from Brigham Young University, and the two friends have crossed paths professionally and socially now and then over the years.

But when it comes to their work, they have little in common. Weaver calls himself a "traditional painter" who favors landscapes; Myer said he constantly experiments and will have several abstract pieces in the show.

Weaver has worked a lot with pottery; Myer dabbles in kinetic art.

They took different roads into the world of education, too.

Weaver grew up in Layton, where he credits his sixth-grade teacher with inspiring him to become an artist. "She had me do bulletin boards and so on, and that was really the thing that got me started into the art field," he said. "I liked the teachers at Davis High School, too. The teachers definitely have an influence, giving students these opportunities."

Thus motivated, he became a teacher himself. Myer, on the other hand, said he was initially drawn to education by another factor: sabbaticals.

"If you're a university professor, you can get a year off with pay if you're doing something that furthers your work and your career," he said, recalling what he learned as a 17-year-old in New Jersey when he met an art professor who was on just such a sabbatical. "I decided that being a university professor would be ideal, because it would give me a steady income -- I knew that being an artist was pretty chancy -- so it looked like university professor would be great."

Myer earned a degree in art from BYU in 1956 and an MFA from the University of Utah in 1959. He taught at University of Nevada Las Vegas for 10 years and at BYU for 28 years, retiring in 2000.

Weaver studied at Utah State University in Logan and taught at the University of Hawaii and the College of Southern Utah (now Southern Utah University) before moving to BYU in 1961. He retired in 1982.

"It's been fun to get ready for the show, and I hope that the people enjoy it," Weaver said. "I've had a great time producing it."

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page F29.